What tools do you use to increase SQL development productivity?
For writing procedures, doing ad-hoc queries, etc, I find SSMS the best tool of those that I've tried, but I still find it a poor tool for many reasons (bad intellisense, to limited in aspects to external tools and keybaord shortcuts, to mention a couple)
So, what tools and plugins do you use, free and commercial, big or small?
Redgate has an intellisense (SQL Prompt) that seems to be decent - but a resource hog. TOAD for SQL is nice to help give you a plethora of alternative ways to write the same query (helps in tuning sometimes)
Other than those, for writing TSQL, I use SSMS (2005 and prefer 2008)
My T-SQL IDE! Surprisingly enough, I get on with it quite well - but I'm very focused on writing T-SQL, and not really managing / using visual table editors etc.
The idea was to bring the intellisense level up to Visual Studio standards - although the language definition of SQL doesn't make that possible sometimes because of it's vagueness (a very basic example being the three different ways to assign an alias to a column). But it is free for personal use, so the price tag is good. :)
For generation of lots of client side code at once, I've been using Apex SQL Code a bit recently too - they've released it free now, and it's quite richly featured, definitely worth a look.
I use SSMS but with SQL Prompt that CirqueDeSQLeil mentions. In fact I have the whole SQL Toolbelt from RedGate so I have tools that sit within SSMS to give me lots of extra functionality - object level restores, smart renaming of objects (dependant objects get re-scripted too), Test data generator, SQL Prompt 'intellisense' (**), Data comparison + Database schema comparison with script generation to synchronise, Database documentor and so on. I also install LogParser, Idera's Job Scheduler, Winmerge, and PowerShellAnalyser to list a few of the free apps that are available.
** - I havent experienced any resource issues using SQL Prompt personally but accept that everyones mileage may vary. I would say try the 14 day trial and see how it goes.
I use SQL Server Management Studio (Intellisence in SQL server 2008) or Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 DB Edition. Sometimes, when I am not developing for SQL server 2008, I use Red-Gate Toolbelt.
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